How can you use strategic thinking to ensure your organization's sustainability?

Strategic thinking for organizational sustainability involves anticipating challenges, identifying opportunities, and aligning resources with long-term goals. By fostering innovation, adapting to market trends, and prioritizing environmental and social responsibility, a company can enhance resilience and secure its longevity in a dynamic business landscape.

To ensure your organization's sustainability, it is important to cultivate strategic alliances and partnerships with like-minded organizations. These collaborations can help leverage resources, access new markets, and mitigate risks. Foster diversity and inclusion within the organization to bring together different perspectives and experiences, leading to more innovative problem-solving. Encourage a learning culture by investing in training programs and mentorship initiatives, enhancing employees' skills and adaptability in uncertain environments.

To me, this is one of the important steps in annual budgeting process, and normally done by the end of the year. For example, we would review which brands are best sellers, which brands have the highest margins (meaning the strengths) so that we have to increase or at least remain their volume to maximise profit. Likewise, which brands have the least volume, then discussing how to expand them or delist as to reduce the loss, meaning weaknesses. In addition, we must consider potential risk and opportunity associated with mitigation plans, which is similar to Opportunity and Threat analysis. Above all, all those analysis taken into account for budgeting, which simply represents what we want to achieve next year.

Sustainability has 2 dimensions to be considered — the classic aspect being the organisations ability to ‘sustain’ and achieve steady performance and growth. However the ‘sustainability’ aspect from the environmental balance has also to be incorporated here. The Firms ability to sustain itself also necessarily means it contributes to the sustenance of its society, nature, people and the earth itself. This means understanding and managing the firms impact in terms of its socio-economic and its environmental impact, alongside its business impact. The sustainability self assessment must be performed on both dimensions - for business performance growth and impact AND the socio-environmental & economic impact.

The Five-forces model is a great start point as it creates a holistic view of the organization and the market to start the strategic thinking. Mapping out customers, suppliers, and competitors and influencing factors like government policy & regulations is essential. Further, tThe SWOT analysis is a time-tested tool for the self-assessment of the organization. By understanding the strengths and weaknesses (intrinsic), and identifying the opportunities and threats (extrinsic) - the organization can bring out strategies : Strengths have to be leveraged for competitive advantage and gains from opportunities, weakness and threats (risks) to be mitigated to counter competition and succeed in the market.

When it comes to organisational sustainability, values shall be considered along with vision and mission. We tend to overestimate the weight of organisational vision and mission, and underestimate the importance of values. In fact the values play a central role in maintaining the consistency with mode of operandi. The key point here is to set organisational values that translate into practice, which in turn support the achievement of the vision. Values are instrumental at several levels: 1-Identification of organisational identity and purpose. 2-Alignment with organisational culture. 3-Shaping of core mandates e. g. employee engagement, stakeholders experience, and social responsibility. 4-Systemic matrix to guide performance assessment.

I believe it's crucial to periodically reassess and align tasks with the overarching vision to avoid getting lost in the details. Regular checkpoints can help maintain focus and ensure alignment with the mission.

Personally, this step should be done first before assessing strengths and weaknesses because without vision and mission, we are not sure where we are heading, are our strategies aligned with company values? For example, our company vision is 100% carbon neutral by 2030, then from now on, every mission and execution plan must be aligned with that vision step by step.

Vision and Mission are important elements from which the strategy radiates forward. The vision comes from a high-level and long-term thinking which sets the aspirational goals and values of the organization. The Mission sets more specific and goal-oriented directions, and set in a more tangible time-frame. The mission statement leads to further deployment of organizational objectives - leading to the deployment of functional/ operational objectives which must be SMART (simple, measureable, achieveable, realistic, timebound) goals.

A long term perspective is very important for the success of any organisation. Strategic thinking is essentially long term. You don't want to win the battle, you want to win the war. By sacrificing short term maximization we can focus on long term value creation

Yes, I agree. Furthermore, the priorities should be categorised as short term and long term ones, then we measure possible contributions to the business as a whole. By doing this, everybody could be aware of what impact to the business financially and/or non financially.

I fully agree. I think this is the most important step in strategic thinking simply because any beautiful plan is just on the paper without actual result if we wouldn't do anything or the right thing. The more realistic the execution plan is, the better. Moreover, the action plan must be agreed and cooperated with every department in an organisation, not only Finance.

Emanating from the Mission and strategic plans - the action plan must be defined and detailed. Each action plan must be aligned to organizational objectives and set functional/ operational objectives which must be SMART (simple-specific, measureable, achieveable, realistic, timebound) goals. Action plans and its execution could follow the simple and evergreen PDCA approach, where the actions and results are measured and next steps are taken based on this. This will ensure the agility and flexibility of the organization to improvise and innovate as the execution goes on.

This is spot on. We have to measure our action plans using quantitative and qualitative KPIs every month. The results must be reviewed by management team for next steps as to how we could close gaps to achieve the outcomes wanted.